Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011
The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the st...
Guides & How-tos · Worked examples · Real numbers
Do it right, with real numbers
Step-by-step how-tos, head-to-head comparisons and honest roundups — every guide worked through with current figures, then backed by a RECATOOLS calculator or AI-directory entry so you can act on it.
510 guides published
17 topic areas
Latest guide Oct 2026
Statistics
35
Health & Wellness
33
Cybersecurity
30
Business
19
Privacy & Data
17
Consumer Tech
14
ASEAN Tech
13
Personality
9
Cloud & Infra
8
Cyber Threat Intel
7
Sustainability
5
Advertisement
The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon
Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixe...
The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei
兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a s...
Mitochondrial DNA does not use the genetic code you were taught
Four codons differ between the standard genetic code and the one your mitochondria use, and two of them are stop signals...
Japan changed its romanisation rules and left names alone
December 2025 replaced the 1954 standard and made Hepburn the basis after roughly seventy years. It explicitly does not...
Korea's romanisation rules never covered surnames
Apply the official standard to the four commonest Korean surnames and you get Gim, I, Bak and Choe. Passports say Kim, L...
What passports do when you have only one name
The near-universal advice is to write FNU in the empty given-name box. That is not an ICAO rule. The standard says a nam...
Why two calculators give you different birth charts
The same birth details can produce different charts because the tradition has argued for centuries about when a day begi...
What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically
Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters entirely, t...
There is no single order to learn Chinese characters
There are at least four orderings, built for different jobs, and they disagree about the first hundred characters more t...
The Chinese characters a bank computer cannot store
A rare character in a legal name fails in four different ways that look identical from the counter. One of them does not...
Why your DNA ancestry estimate is vaguer if you are Asian
A result full of "Broadly" labels is telling you something real, but not about your ancestry. One company's own document...
Advertisement